I'm running the profiler on Windows Embedded for POS, as that's the hardware we're using for our POS application.

I'm having a problem where when starting profiling, the charting options are disabled, and the cpu graph disappers after about a minute, and doesn't progress anymore.

The strange thing is that I ran the trial version of the profiler, and version 5, and they worked just fine.

I've tried it on XP SP3, and while the charting options were also disabled there, the cpu graph moved along just fine.

When I bought and activated version 6, about an hour ago, I ran into those problems.

I'm profiling a .net 2.0 application.

Edit: I think I just realized my mistake, I bought the Standard edition, which indeed in the feature list doesn't have saving profiling results... but I would have expect it to profile more than one minute...

Edit: bought the professional version, and it was indeed the issue. I'll open a seperate thread about the profiling for one minute problem

Edit: never mind about the one minute thing, apparently it took a bit of time to update the screen.

Last edited by MikiWatts on Tue Aug 16, 2011 8:47 am, edited 3 times in total.

Nope, no such luck, replaced the dll and recompiled, but no difference. If I let the application run, after stopping the profiler, I can still see the results for the functions and the cpu graph also updates the results when I select regions on it, up to that minute or so of time displayed.

Sorry the results from Profiler are so confusing. All we know from the miniscule information in the log is that the process 'PrioryPOSGUI' is not running, or the windows performance subsystem can't generate counter data for it. Is it running in Task Manager?

If ANTS Performance Profiler is starting the program and then making it crash, you can try using the "methods only" profiling mode and see if that keeps it going. There have been problems with the Microsoft symbol reader libraries causing crashes so switching off line-level timings may make it work and if so we can go through a debugging process to try to find the offening symbols.

Ok, I thought the cpu graph was ok, but it's still not working right...

The graph is running ok, until about 1:30 minutes, when it fills the screen, and then it just disappers, and the time ticks don't progress any further. When I save the results, and try to view them, it shows the cpu graph, but it looks messed and has overlapping lines.

Here's what it looks like:

If I wait long enough, to about 2:30, without touching the application, it suddenly starts working again, but you can still see the mixed up cpu lines at the start:

Edit: OK, something is just not working right here... even if I leave the profiler running for 2 minutes, then perform a few actions with my application, and then try to view the results, I only see results from operations that run in background threads and not from the UI thread itself.

Edit: now the version 5 started doing it ! It worked just fine before:

Did you check Task Manager and see if the process is not running? The graph is indicating something yes, but not the root cause of the problem. It's either not running or it's disconnected from performancve counters. Sorry to say when there is a problem Profiler can just stop cold like this and not feed back any status about the process.

I tried doing the same on a different POS machine, which had the version 5 profile without the version 6 installed, and used the same application version that I used with the first POS machine. It worked just fine there.

OK, I found the culprit... my application adjusts the local machine time, to make it match the server time, relative to time zones. Apparently, doing this while running the profiler, really throws it into a loop...

So, problem solved. I'd suggest maybe adding some check for a change in the computer time, if the effects are so severe ?